Ok, first of all, you should be displaying full text for your feeds; none of this crap where you only display a teaser. Teasers are a waste of time, and just wear me out. I have RSS feeds because I DON’T want to visit the site and wait for all your images to load. I want to be able to judge for myself whether your post is important without having to visit the real thing.

Anyway, here’s my point in this article: you should design your articles with RSS feeds in mind first. If you run a blog, that’s probably how a lot of your viewership reads what you write. What does this mean for your code? Well, it means you need gracefully degrading, semantic HTML.

Semantic HTML

You need descriptive HTML that splits your articles into sections logically. You don’t always have access to CSS styling (or at least, you can’t count on it), so you should be using your headers, paragraph elements, and lists as appropriate. If your article is viewed without anything other than default styling, your readers will still be able to easily skim to where they want to read.

Graceful degradation

If a feed reader does support HTML (most nowadays do), you won’t be able to count on certain things, like external stylesheets, background images, or video and normal images working properly. If you post a video, make sure to also post a link directly to the video.

Basically, if something you’re writing won’t work without CSS, find a different way to do it. You can’t make your feed look just like your web page, and you shouldn’t try either. They’re essentially different media.